Love Amongst Ruin is the nom de rock of Steve Hewitt, a musician best known for playing drums in moody U.K. alt-rock band Placebo from 1996 to 2007, including their classic albums like Without You I’m Nothing and Sleeping With Ghosts. But Hewitt is just as skilled in front of a microphone as he was behind a drumkit, as the band’s self-titled debut in 2010 proved. Now, LAR are preparing for the release of their long-awaited sophomore album Lose Your Way, out June 30 on Ancient B Records, but today, we’re sharing with you an alternate version of that album’s title track. Hewitt explains its genesis:

“The inspiration for ‘Lose Your Way’ came about after I initially came up with the opening guitar line. It was an immediate backdrop that set the the mood for the context of the vocal. To me it had a suggestion of feeling lost, but lost internally. When you can have your family and friends around you but somehow you find yourself in a place where nothing makes sense or that you’ve taken a wrong turn in pursuit of reaching something you wanted.

The reason we did the Revision mix was because the remixes we were getting in didn’t seem relative to the songs they were based on. I was just in bed one evening and I had been thinking of some of the ideas I had recorded for B-sides after finishing the album. I hadn’t done much with them but one of the ideas, a piano and drum groove called ‘1984’ kept going around in my head. I then started thinking of ‘Lose Your Way’ and in my head both fit perfectly.

The next day I got the files up and sat the vocals to ‘Lose Your Way’ on top of ‘1984’ and it worked straight away. From there we added a few flavors, and that was that. All done in the name of experiment, really. It seemed more valid as a remix than anything else I had been hearing.”

Check out the revised version of “Lose Your Way” exclusively on Substream:

Now, check out the original version of “Lose Your Way” below to hear the difference:

Scott Heisel is a writer and editor for hire. He has been writing professionally since 1997, with thousands of bylines in numerous national publications, including Alternative Press, where he was a member of their in-house editorial staff for 10 years.

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